"TEHRAN - After months of false starts, dire warnings and political wrangling, Iran has embarked on a sweeping program of cuts in its costly and inefficient system of subsidies on fuel and other essential goods that has put a strain on state finances and held back economic progress for years.
The government’s success in overcoming political obstacles to make the cuts and its willingness to risk social upheaval suggest that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad may have consolidated power after the internal fractures that followed his bitterly disputed re-election in 2009 — a development that some analysts believe could influence Iran’s position at nuclear talks in Istanbul this month."
A "politically confident" Iran? Yeah, right. That's why its per capita capital punishment rate is among the highest in the world. "Ahmadinejad may have consolidated power"? Is this another way of saying that many of his opponents are now languishing in Evin Prison?
According to this article written from Tehran, "the subsidy reforms could be a political victory for Iran’s new right wing — a success for Mr. Ahmadinejad where liberals, now almost entirely excluded from Iran’s political scene, had failed." Liberals have been "excluded" from Iran's political scene? That is a very kind way of putting it.
This article also states: "Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said recently that international sanctions had slowed Iran’s nuclear program". Oddly, this article never once mentions the Stuxnet worm (http://jgcaesarea.blogspot.com/2010/11/stuxnet-shuts-down-iranian-centrifuges.html), which has wrecked havoc with Iranian centrifuges.
Also no mention in this article of potential fallout from the forthcoming findings of the U.N. tribunal investigating the assassination of Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, which was undertaken with the approval of Tehran.
No comments:
Post a Comment